Sunday, June 11, 2017

Our Crude News Network

Progressive media bias
is now a given. The present generation of journalists and reporters tends to
believe that just conveying the news no longer offers ample venue for their
unappreciated talents, celebrity status, and deserved political influence.

As a result, they
often massage coverage to find relevance as makers, not mere deliverers, of
news. Like many academics, writers, and intellectuals of our bicoastal elite
landscapes, they are naturally self-described idealists and left-of-center both
politically and culturally.

Yet Donald Trump’s election as president has redefined the American media by
stripping nearly all pretenses off its once carefully sculpted disinterested
veneer. In other words, never before in American presidential history—not even
during the dark days of Watergate—have the media so despised a sitting
president.

The reasons have
become clear: the outsider billionaire Trump’s politically-incorrect blasts and
personal invective, his non-Washingtonian and often in-your-face behavior, his
combative and undisguised contempt for progressive elites, his unexpected and unapologetic
conservative agendas, and the liberal depression over his shocking victory that
stopped cold an anticipated 16-year progressive agenda that really would have
fundamentally transformed America in perhaps irrevocable fashion.

So the media’s anti-Trumpism
is now daily fare. The Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public
Policy’s recent media bias study found that Trump coverage by CNN, to take one
example, was 93% negative—a far greater percentage than even its earlier
documented prejudices in 2008 and 2012 against John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Donald Trump’s election as
president has redefined the American media by stripping nearly all pretenses
off its once carefully sculpted disinterested veneer. In other words, never
before in American presidential history—not even during the dark days of
Watergate—have the media so despised a sitting president.

But after nearly
two-years of an anti-Trump drumbeat, CNN’s rote biases have become pedestrian.
There are only so many ways a Don Lemon or Fared Zakaria can express his
antipathies for Donald Trump that so far seem to have had little effect on
Trump’s presidency.

So what comes next
after mostly polished and polite disdain?

The last two weeks
answered that question: obscenity, crudity, and a sort of cruelty—ironic given
those are some of the character defects that CNN has lectured the nation about
are inherent in Donald Trump.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was forced to confess that he was both “crude” and
“unprofessional” when, during an-on-air panel discussion, he cut off Trump
supporter Jeffery Lord with the following putdown: “If he took a dump on his
desk you would defend it. I mean, I don’t know what he would do that you would
not defend!” What a strange simile for an anchor to use in front of a national
audience.

Then there was the
macabre photo moment of comedian Kathy Griffin—a CNN New Year’s Eve show
co-host with Anderson Cooper—hoping to recapture fading attention by holding,
in ISIS fashion, a gruesome bloody decapitated model of Donald Trump’s head.
Like Anderson Cooper, Griffith later apologized, but given that she was not so
central to CNN, she was expendable and so let go. Her dismissal helped spark
her subsequent whiny rant that she was now herself a victim of an untoward
backlash from the Trump family. (The passive-aggressive Griffin herself once
ridiculed Sarah Palin’s Down’s Syndrome child with “Oh, Palin, ur goin down so
hard, you’d better just stay in Wasilla w ur “retarded baby”).

After the recent
savage terrorist attacks in London, CNN’s “religion” scholar, Reza Aslan
(heretofore infamous largely for eating cooked brain tissues with
self-described religious cannibals in India), wrote: “This piece of s— is a not
just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an
embarrassment to humankind.” Aslan is channeling the vulgarity of other
journalists, which in turn has brought the inner vulgarian out of politicos
like Tom Perez, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Burton and other
Democratic grandees.

These vulgar
anti-Trump biases of journalists and celebrities on CNN are not new. We
remember, for example, the December 2016 hot-mic, off-camera video joke of
CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux and her producers about the idea of
President-elect Trump’s plane crashing. CNN, we also recall, was one of the
first networks to air the existence of the fake-news dossier about Trump’s
supposed sexual escapades in Moscow last January. The list of unhinged
statements by CNN panel members and anchors could be expanded, but the point is
not biasper se, but what accounts for the
recent emphases on the grotesque (beheading chic, references to feces on a
desk, scatology like “piece of s—t”)?

Crudity is not for the sake of crudity alone, but exists now for
politics, and in particular for destroying Trump. The elite of the Left also
believes, in ends-justifying-the-means fashion, that their ideological nobility
demands unusual methods that might better further their message. CNN is merely
the news façade of televised culture in general, as characterized by the
obscene references to Trump fellatio and incest by celebrities or reporters
like Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and Julia Joffe. Once Trump is deemed bad,
then bad language and imagery are necessary to deal with him—the lower the bar,
the better.

The answers are many.
Propriety has largely vanished from American discourse, a legacy of the 1960s
when “f—k” and “s—t” superseded old expletives like “damn”, largely because of
the supposed revolutionary shock effect on polite, staid society. Now a
coarsened culture has become indifferent to commonplace obscenity and we are in
a downward spiral of always seeking the next scatological or sexual
one-uppance.

Crudity is not for
the sake of crudity alone, but exists now for politics, and in particular for
destroying Trump. The elite of the Left also believes, in
ends-justifying-the-means fashion, that their ideological nobility demands
unusual methods that might better further their message. CNN is merely the news
façade of televised culture in general, as characterized by the obscene
references to Trump fellatio and incest by celebrities or reporters like
Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and Julia Joffe. Once Trump is deemed bad, then
bad language and imagery are necessary to deal with him—the lower the bar, the
better.

Political and
cultural impotence also explains the desperate descent into scatology and the
macabre. The progressive establishment—network news, major newspapers, PBS and
NPR, Hollywood, academia and the foundations—failed to stop the election of
Donald Trump and the 100-day implementation so far of his anti-Obama agenda
executive orders. Yet Trump was himself an adornment to ongoing Democratic
losses of state legislatures, governorships, the House and Senate, and the
Supreme Court. As a result, frustrated elites are psychologically melting down,
as if unhinged crudity might do what past political messages and agendas and
even the courts could not. If you will not change your political message, and
your political message will not win the Electoral College, then you either hope
to turn up the cultural heat in hopes that others will melt first or simply
yourself spontaneously combust.

Sheer incompetence
and laziness also play their own roles in the decline of networks like CNN into
crude political movements rather than disinterested news agencies.

CNN has no idea of
what are its standards of professional conduct (can a CNN political analyst
like Donna Brazile leak debate questions to a candidate ahead of an upcoming
CNN presidential primary debate and then subsequently lie about her behavior?).
Instead. it adjudicates these scandals apparently on the basis, first, of the
relative value of the offender to CNN’s profitability, and, second, of claims
on race/gender/sexual preference persecution and victimhood (cf. Brazile’s
initial stonewalling denials: “As a Christian woman I understand persecution,
but I will not stand here and be persecuted because your information is totally
false.”). More recently, CNN was charged with supposedly choreographing
anti-terrorism protests in London, ostensibly as a way to further its narrative
that British Muslim communities were outraged over the terrorists among them
and actively seeking to suppress them.

As a result, frustrated elites are psychologically melting down,
as if unhinged crudity might do what past political messages and agendas and
even the courts could not. If you will not change your political message, and
your political message will not win the Electoral College, then you either hope
to turn up the cultural heat in hopes that others will melt first or simply
yourself spontaneously combust.

Again, CNN has no
real norms about making rather than reporting news because in our age of fake
news, JournoList, the Wikileaks trove, and Washington political/media power
marriages there are no recognized ethical boundaries any more in journalism.
(Will updated network ethical handbooks have to specify that on-camera
employees are barred from eating human flesh, or from exhibiting decapitated
representational heads of politicians?) From Jorge Ramos to Jim Rutenberg, we
hear defiantly that disinterested journalism is passé, and active media
opposition to Trump’s narratives is now necessary in lieu of an effective
Democratic Party resistance.

Over the next four years,
expect CNN and others to follow further the trajectories of late-night
potty-mouth comedians and unhinged performance artists who must seek to shock
or vent when they can no longer either elucidate or entertain. In sum, the aim
of crude network news is now to propagandize by any means necessary.

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About Me

pole'cat n. 1. creature of fierce, brave, fearless heart willing to go against opponents at a moments notice. 2. nickname of one Don Polson in grade school in Heyworth, Illinois, frequently used in a game of "red rover," as in "red rover, red rover, let polecat come over" upon which said polecat flung himself into the opposing line with abandon.
I'm happy to provide you with some of the best conservative stuff (and non-conservative stuff that, nonetheless, helps inform and illumine) I can find on the web. Oldest posts are at the end--enjoy and learn something.